Siegbert Prawer begins his book with an anecdote about the wife of a Jewish shopkeeper amazed and excited about the concept of people lining up to pay money for a product they had yet to see. Like the shopkeeper's wife, Prawer, a specialist in German language and literature, has been seduced by early film, having written texts on some of the classics of Weimar cinema. Between Two Worlds combines a lifetime of scholarship and personal experience—Prawer himself is a German-Jewish emigre—and makes a needed contribution to Central European cultural studies.

Similar to Omer Bartov's recent The “Jew” in Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), Prawer details what he calls the “Jewish presence” primarily by analyzing characterizations in film. Excepting his introductory chapter, Prawer sections his book by broadly defined film types and chronology. Silent dramas, comedies, and “enlightenment” films (Sittenfilme) come first, followed by chapters on sound transition films, realism, films with specific confrontational Jewish content, and musicals. Interspersed are profiles of well-known, Jewish-origin film giants (e.g., Paul Davidson, Erich Pommer), lesser luminaries (Otto Kreisler, Carl Mayer), and those whom Prawer feels are the underappreciated (Richard Oswald, Max Pallenberg). Prawer's prose is smooth and his language florid. Although his detailed descriptions of individual features occasionally feel catalogic and rarely incorporate audience reception, he more than compensates with analyses filled with critical insights and entertaining, sometimes personal, anecdotes.

The book serves two essential purposes. First, it clearly establishes the massive contributions Jews made to the establishment of film as an art during the formative years of the motion picture, bringing needed recognition to Jewish producers, directors, composers, and writers. Prawer asserts, convincingly, that the cinema industries of Germany and Austria both owe crucial debts to Jewish talent as there was not a facet of filmmaking between 1910 and 1933 untouched by innovations made by individuals of Jewish origin (91, 201–04). Second, it interrogates the concept of the Jewish “presence.” In addition to allowing Prawer to analyze a great range of films, the concept also permits him to consider “problems of Jewish individuals and communities” in a multitude of historical and intellectual settings and from a myriad of perspectives that he suggests are “representative” (viii, xii). Purposely avoiding the jargon of film studies, Prawer instead presents a series of “encounters . . . embodying Jewish experiences in different social, intellectual, and psychological situations” (197).

Prawer makes a persuasive case that the corpus of Jewish characters, Jewish themes, Jewish motifs, and Jewish professionals in German film did constitute something unique. This Jewish presence represented a range of experience never before available for the German-speaking public's consumption. In many ways, the pre-1933 era was a golden age of boundary crossing and collaboration, one rapidly destroyed when the regimes and ideologies of the 1930s made the borders of religion, race, class, gender, and nation impenetrable and the concept of collaboration with a Jew anathema.

Prawer seamlessly integrates a series of polemics in his text. For example, he jousts with those who argue that The Golem: How He Came into the World should be read as an anti-Semitic text (33–41). He pointedly engages in the debate about Jewish assimilation and acculturation, concluding that professional Jews did not abandon their Jewish identities and religious practices, as some authors have claimed. Rather, Jews of German and Austro-Hungarian origin who contributed to early cinema projected a spectrum of stories, some highlighting Jewish tradition, some rejecting it; a range of characters, including sympathetic orthodox figures; and a host of social problems, some broadcasting the historic hostility and discrimination faced by Jews (200). These men and women presented the Jewish experience instead of sublimating it.

In Prawer's epilogue, the shadow of the Holocaust looms large. Prawer takes up the cudgel against the myth that served as the rationale to end Jewish involvement in most Central European film production, the so-called “Jewish agenda” to use culture to “subvert or supersede a ‘Germanic’ or ‘Aryan’ life-style” (205). Prawer refutes this myth, highlighting Jews who produced pro-German, pro-Austrian, or Prussophile films. Yet in defending Jewish loyalty and patriotism, he stumbles over the hurdle of identity. Between Two Worlds is a book in which Jewish distinctiveness is asserted as more than an identity ascribed by others. Movies, Prawer claims, could incorporate a “Jewish experience, imagination, sensibility, musicality, [and] wit” (210), as well as a “Jewish tone and skepticism” (191). Jews themselves, he intimates throughout, possessed a unique, and shared, outlook on life. Sittenfilme, for example, attracted Jewish writers, directors, producers, and reformers because they appealed to “a traditional Jewish sense of social justice, based on biblical and Talmudic traditions and strengthened by long experience of injustices in the Diaspora” (81). These underanalyzed, but oft accepted assumptions of essential Jewish difference, without comparison to non-Jewish productions, leave the reader wishing that an otherwise fascinating text included a more robust exploration of the concept(s) of “Jewishness” which surfaced in early twentieth-century Central European cinema.